We visited one of my favourite beaches in South Wales; Port Eynon. It's a beautiful beach in the Gower made more interesting by the fact that a lot of the sand is washing away (no one really knows why) which is revealing the stumps of trees and other flora that has been preserved on the sea floor for thousands of years! Amazing!
But also quite sad because the beach is totally different to how it looked as I was growing up. It used to be a very sandy beach but is now very stony and muddy. Another major feature that this beach has adopted since I was a child is masses and masses of little pieces of plastic, all different colours, shapes and sized, all different types of plastic, stringy, spongy, hard, soft and all of it floats. I never remember there being so much plastic on the beach when I was a child and it breaks my heart that in just 25 years or so the coast of the UK has been littered with these little pieces of plastic which cause so much damage to sea life. These pieces of plastic will be on these beaches FOREVER. They will eventually degrade into smaller and smaller pieces so we won't be able to see them but the will choke micro organisms which try to eat them. I feel so ashamed for what humankind has done to this beautiful planet.
Some of the flotsam can my quite visually attractive.
Boris found a starfish or "Star crab" as he prefers to call them, which he duly rescued and placed gently into a tock pool.
Here you can see the remains of preserved flora which is thousands of years old amazing to think we are seeing this again since such a long time. Also equally amazing to think that this land used to be forest!
Picking his way through the pieces of plastic.
In this small section of sand I found over 13 pieces of plastic.
Every time I visit the beach I make a point of collecting 3 pieces of littler and putting them in the bin. It's not much but if all of us picked up 3 pieces of plastic every time we visited the beach we might make at least a small dent in the massive problem. Find out some more information here: http://www.take3.org.au/main/page_blog.html
That's very sad. I love the beaches along that part of the coast, there are so many gorgeous ones. We stayed at Port Eynon itself about 8 years ago now and it sounds like it's changed a fair bit in just that time. It must have been amazing growing up around there and lovely to be able to go back and visit it so easily now, even if it has changed. We always take a rubbish bag with us when we go to the beach, and put in everything we see. Most of the year the beaches near us are very good as far as litter is concerned, but it's amazing how much that changes in the Summer when we hit holiday season. All of a sudden there's so much more, and even horrible things like used disposable nappies. Very frustrating, there's just no need for it to happen.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for visiting my blog. Wow that really is awful and sad. It did occur to me when I was there that there may come a time that we can't walk bear foot on the beach, even that day we found broken glass in the sand. It scares me really. What have we done to this beautiful planet?
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